Snowy Roads Mean Many Presents Won't Be Present for Christmas

Some presents and cards that were expected to arrive by Christmas aren't going to make it.

Mail carriers and package deliverers, to customers' dismay, have found many places too dangerous or obstructed to reach.

The problem isn't isolated to Kitsap County. Trucks and planes are getting stuck or delayed by bad weather that is sweeping the nation.

The United Parcel Service Web site says all of Washington and Oregon are bogged down by severe weather conditions and many areas are inaccessible because of ice and snow. The announcement says the company's service guarantee doesn't apply when delays are beyond its control.

Mike Fenn, who owns the UPS Store in Silverdale, said the normally smooth flow of packages looks like an anaconda that swallowed a bunch of animals.

"It has intermittent lumps that wind up becoming one big bump. The lumps have caused things to slow down at any number of places," he said.

His store, however, is accessible to delivery trucks and hasn't had any trouble shipping packages out.

Kitsap's anaconda is coiled at the UPS hub at the top of Werner Road in West Bremerton. Seven trailer containers are filled with packages that couldn't be delivered and were brought back. There were nine, but drivers are trying to empty two trailers each day along with delivering all of the new packages that arrive, clerk Lee Sonier said.

"We have trailer upon trailer still locked up that we haven't gotten to," she said. "We're trying to catch up. We have a whole pile of people trying to pick up (packages) and we have to tell them the same thing — its in the trailer and we're doing our best."

Customers are not happy, she said.

That would describe Bryan Whitlock, whose wife's Christmas present is in one of the trailers. It was scheduled to be delivered on Dec. 18, but the brown truck couldn't make it up steep Roanoke Road near Brownsville, where the Whitlocks live.

"Instead of going to will call where I could pick it up, it got put in a storage container and locked up, and no one can get to it," Whitlock said. "They're just stuck until they get rid of their backlog."

When customers go online to search for a package, the UPS Web site says it has been delivered, but it's really sitting in a trailer, a frustrated Sonier said.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail is supposed to keep mail carriers from their appointed rounds, but they might have to take a mulligan this year.

Mara Perry of Viewcrest Drive in Bremerton says delivery was erratic during the past week as one snowstorm bumped into another. Her street, which hasn't been plowed, hadn't gotten any mail since Saturday, she said.

Then two priority packages were delivered to her door on Tuesday, but the one she called to have picked up wasn't taken. She wound up walking it 11/2 miles to the post office.

"That was a real joy," she said.

Bremerton postmaster Sandy Sadak said there might be some customers that carriers can't reach. It'd help if they could shovel their sidewalks, steps and approaches to their mailboxes.

"The customers have been very forgiving of the whole situation, and I appreciate that," she said. "It's just terrible timing. This is our busiest package season and all this weather on top of it."